Thursday, 7 March 2013

Hyperborea

I will actually talk about Hyperborea itself in a bit. Before that though, here are yestern's and today's videos. Actually, no. Before that, this:

got picked up by a Terry Pratchett discussion forum, presumably via a friend, so that's good.

Anyway, sorry about that. I've been approaching a hundred, also known as 84, subs, so i made a commitment in this video, which is yesterday's:

to do a shout out to anyone who wanted it in the next three subs. One person turned me down, one had no videos, then there was Tim Downs, whose channel is here. He also made this a response to my Patrick Moore video:

Therefore, he definitely should get a call-out, so that's what i'm doing, and that's what the upcoming video (which has yet to render) will be about.

What made things a bit more complicated was that just as i hit the century, for whatever reason (and i probably should try to work out what it was if i can but refrain from speculation before i gather evidence), i also lost a subscriber. I don't yet know who. This has, however, somehow given me an idea (can't see the connection but it's there somewhere): do a showcase every twelve subscribers, though not the whole video. This means the next one will be once i get nine dozen subs. There are a couple of problems: not everyone has any videos at all and even if they have they might not want a shoutout, and also, what happened today could happen again - subs drop below the target number and i either have to do it again with another subscriber or drop it. Even so, that is the general plan.

The video is now ready:

Click to tweet: http://clicktotweet.com/ETj8Q .

This is, as undertaken, a callout to the subscriber who got me to a hundred subs, the musician Tim Downs. Check out his channel, which is here: http://www.youtube.com/user/Tinytim3013 . Thanks for subbing Tim.

However, this process was complicated by the fact that i lost a subscriber just after i hit 100. For some reason i don't understand, this gave me the idea that instead of waiting for a single, large landmark, i should callout and showcase a channel which has videos on it, with the YouTuber's permission, every dozen subs. This could turn this channel into a purely showcasing channel, which is too introspective, but i will insert something every twelve if i get enough subscribers who produce their own videos. The next one will therefore be triggered when i get to nine dozen, also known as 108.

Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

So then, Hyperborea, about which i have almost certainly blogged here before. Hyperboreais the lost continent beyond the North Wind, one of several corresponding to the points of the compass. It's also seen as the mythical homeland of the German people, i.e. us, though not necessarily by the kind of people you'd invite to a dinner party. The weird thing about Hyperborea from a contemporary Western perspective is that it's supposed to be warm and sunny, and without night. This is very difficult to achieve. I was confronted with this problem when i wrote 'Here Be Dragons', because griffins are from Hyperborea. My solution was to decide that "north", or rather "boreas", meant something different in sense to the Greeks than it means to us, such as "the direction of Scythia", partly because many of them saw the world as flat, at least during the Bronze Age. This is what originally gave me the idea of placing the axis of Ancient World through the East and West Indies, which would make both Terra Australis and Hyperborea close to the Equator (though not actually on it - they're tropical but not equatorial.). Here's a map of Hyperborea:

...and here's a map of Pluto, for obvious reasons:

On the other channel, i have decided to do a web series, probably for the first time ever on that subject. It will have about five or six episodes. I have decided that my loyal viewership deserves new material. Obviously you will never see it.